Quotes About Clarity

Knowing what to measure, and how to measure it, can make a complicated world less so.

As Albert Einstein liked to say, everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.

It is easy to get seduced by complexity; but there is virtue in simplicity too.

When you are consumed with the rightness or wrongness of a given issue—whether it's fracking or gun control or genetically engineered food—it's easy to lose track of what the issue actually is.

Daniel Kahneman has written: "[W]e can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.

There is nothing like the sheer power of numbers to scrub away layers of confusion and contradiction.

Here is the broader point: whatever problem you're trying to solve, make sure you're not just attacking the noisy part of the problem that happens to capture your attention. Before spending all your time and resources, it's incredibly important to properly define the problem—or, better yet, redefine the problem.

Tis much better to do a little with certainty and leave the rest for others that come after than to explain all things by conjecture without making sure of any thing.

But when it comes to solving problems, one of the best ways to start is by putting away your moral compass. Why? When you are consumed with the rightness or wrongness of a given issue—whether it's fracking or gun control or genetically engineered food—it's easy to lose track of what the issue actually is.

There is no greater abuse of the Bible than to proclaim in God's name what God is not saying.

But when something is easy to imagine, it's often because you've failed to imagine it in sufficient detail.

We had to keep explaining things, backtracking and filling gaps. We realised our own conversations had evolved into a kind of shorthand, a tidy, neat little minimalism. Covering the whole canvas in broad obvious brushstrokes for outsiders felt like a waste of sounds, time and effort. Speaking with footnotes .

Geniuses don't go mad," he said. "That's what people don't understand. They get out so far out that the water is like glass and they can see for miles and see so much, and in ways people have never seen before.

An absence of information is not the same as information about an absence." We're blind to our blindness.

Hunches that don't connect are doomed to stay hunches.

two key preconditions become clear. First, the sheer size of the network: you can't have an epiphany with only three neurons firing.

Flow is not the singular intensity of focusing "like a laser," as we often say. And it is not the miraculous illumination of a sudden brainstorm. Rather, it is more the feeling of drifting along a stream, being carried in a clear direction, but still tossed in surprising ways by the eddies and whirls of moving water.

The error is needed to set off the truth, much as a dark background is required for exhibiting the brightness of a picture.

What looks inevitable in hindsight is often invisible with foresight.

All no means is they don't know for sure or there's a secret being kept, like someone's trying to hide something really good.

The Greeks called that sudden understanding anamnesis. Literally, "the forgetting of the forgetting.

The better you know something, the less you remember about how hard it was to learn. The curse of knowledge is the single best explanation I know of why good people write bad prose.

In explaining any human shortcoming, the first tool I reach for is Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

we can remind ourselves of the reasons to strive for good style: to enhance the spread of ideas, to exemplify attention to detail, and to add to the beauty of the world.